A healthy maternal diet promotes a healthy gut bacteria in infants, which has been found to result in in smarter toddlers. Optimum brain development is dependent on the right fats, vitamins and minerals. Iodine, for example, is one of many essentials in a mother’s diet, aiding child brain development.

Women’s health – a human rights issue

In an ideal world, the perfect maternal diet hinted at in all this research is easily achievable. But this is not an ideal world, and poverty-related malnutrition (rather than the west’s damning paradox of wealth-related malnutrition) remains a blight on the lives of millions of mothers-to-be and their unborn children.

As stated in a recent World Health Organisation publication highlighting the plight of women in sub-Saharan Africa, “investing in women’s health is [not] primarily utilitarian […], women’s health is above all a human rights issue and should be supported and promoted as such”.

As we keep saying, the health of future generations relies, as it always has, on the health of mothers.